I realise that in the preceding rant I've made reference to the "blabber" philosophers Foucault and Merleau-Ponty, but also acknowledge the Australian Anglo-American Analytic philosopher Frank Jackson (by refering to the "Mary" thought experiment) as well as Braddon-Mitchell. Confused? Well also consider, I've been lucky enough to be present both at one of the few lectures by Jaques Derrida in Australia, and at the innaugural symposium for the Centre for Consciousness at ANU (wherein Frank Jackson admitted publicly for the first time that he was no longer sure what the "Mary" experiment actually demonstrated). I'm not bragging, rather my point is that there are decent philosophical minds on both sides of the (strangely arbitrary) divide. Certainly, the American Literary Theorists took one very small part of Derrida's work out of context and used it mercilessly to critique all and sundry, until people caught on and stopped paying them...but you can't blame Derrida for ALT. Most (but not all) Heideggerian philosophers I've met have been as dismissive of Analytic philosophy as say Devitt and Sterelny are of poststructuralism...the commonality being that in both cases neither party actually read the primary sources. Poor philosophy is poor philosophy on both sides of the continental/analytic "divide" and those that buy into the rhetoric without doing the hard yards are just plain ignorant (no offence meant to anyone in particular, all the preceding is merely IMHO, etc., etc.) 

has a famous essay called "What is it like to be a bat" or whatever the title is. What do you think about his point there, distrans, that even if physicalism is true, we can't pretend to understand how consciousness "emerges" from the body/brain?

To be frank, I don't know if you addressed that already in your posts, since you use lots of terminology that obliterate my senses! 

You write in such a "fancy" style? It's kinda annoying to read, but maybe that's just me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary's_room

Anyway, the Mary experiment. I assume this is done by clueless philosophers who know nothing about neuroscience?

This is pretty easy to deconstruct. Basically, knowing something about something isn't the same as experiencing something. If you know what would approximately happen when someone hits you in the face, versus if someone hits you in the face, god damn, they are completely different things on all levels. Sensory, brain, feelings, you know, you could make tests, I bet the latter would make people much less happy than the former, even if you asked people to imagine hard...

In the extreme physicalist sense, seeing red things causes direct brain activation that can not happen if you see the word "red" or hear descriptions about it etc etc.. This brain activation can't be done any other way except by seeing red. There are huge areas of the brain dedicated to it, formed during the evolution.

I think the thought experiment doesn't demonstrate anything else except the sad state of philosophy - they seem utterly clueless about basic physiology, and somehow think people are very different from animals, we are not very much slaves of our senses like them "filthy" animals are, or that somehow in our high fantasies we could present to our own brains whatever we wanted.

There are direct ways to affect the brain which the brain can not itself "simulate", maybe with drugs or in some other very strong hallucinations. That way Mary could have "simulated" the sensation.

There are people who shoot themselves, just to "get to know how it feels". That's what Mary would get to know. "Ok, this is how it actually feels like to see red."
I don't know if it'd make much sense to her though if she hadn't grown up in a world of colors.

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What's interesting if you look at the senses, is the sense of smell. People can recognize a big amount of different smells, and they all feel very different too. That is weird.

Taste, vision or touch are just combinations of a finite set of "basic" variables as senses. But smell can be different, in it that it has thousands of dimensions.

If you read basic neuroscience, you also see the anatomy and physiology of smell is different from other senses.

If I did qualia research, I'd work with smells.

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Collective consciousness. Oh great. Maybe that's what the philosophers nowadays love to babble about. It's become utterly irrelevant to anything real anymore. 

That's what Mary would get to know. "Ok, this is how it actually feels like to see red."

so, it does demonstrate something other than the sad state of philosophy.

If I did qualia research, I'd work with smells.

Indeed, my inclination too.

Collective consciousness

err...I thought I dismissed this?

inertia: I found my copy of the piece...I'll get back to you in a month or so :) 

Nagel just says that if physicalism is true then we have to understand how the body (brain) "produces" subjective experience.

IMHO, it's an intriguing introduction to the whole issue, but not that useful. 

the point of the Mary story is that not all knowledge is knowledge of the world, therefore a physicalist account of reality is incomplete. 

interesting posts... you're into a depth I never got to in college, but I did want to mention something I hadn't before -- if consciousness is a continuum instead of a yes/no proposition, that doesn't just mean dogs and jellyfish are "less" conscious, but it also means that creatures or machines could be even MORE conscious than us. And it also opens the door for the idea that we could have our consciousnesses elevated somehow (drugs or something else).

But I also have a big concern about the difference between being more conscious and having the feeling of being more conscious. I've had dreams in which ideas seemed funny, or clever, and when I wake up and remember the content of the dream, I realize that it wasn't that funny, or it wasn't that clever. The thing about dreams that seem so compelling is that they don't have to present an actual experience (of hearing something funny or insightful or clever), becuase they can short circuit that whole process and present the feeling of having an experience (of hearing something funny or insightful or clever).

This is one thing that troubles me about this is that it means that the experience of being "more conscious" can also easily be a fake. We can easily identify things that make our brains less reliable, like sleep deprivation, drugs, etc. But with those things absent, how could distinguish between a real heightened consciousness and just the feeling of having heightened consciousness?

This sounds kind of paradoxical since I previously equated consciousness with a feeling of thinking, but that feeling does have to rest on some physical foundation, and so it can't be wholly mistaken.

Also, regarding your statement about how we get more conscious as our lives progress, is it really more of a narrowing of focus? Are we excluding more and more of raw input and is more and more of our experience pre-filtered by our expectations? This kind of plays into a suspicion I have that things like language and analytical thought actually enforce a structure on the mind, and while it may feel like the internal world becomes more and more crisp, is it really just becoming more limited? Otherwise, where does the extra complexity come from in our finite brains?

(Sorry none of these ideas are well-formed or cross-referenced to any academic tradition :) 

Ok, I wrote an elaborate text but I have to boil it down even more.

You are implying that if physicalism were true, mary shouldn't go "ooh"? It doesn't make sense.

Why? Your assumptions are unclear.

Mary should be able to "simulate" color sensations just with the information of brain patterns? But then she should be able to generate the actual sensations. And then she wouldn't go "ooh", as she's had it before already. She'd go "well, exactly as I predicted".

And if she goes ooh, it's just the lack of possibility of doing the experiment to herself. Physical limitations.

Metl:"Not all knowledge is knowledge of the world..." well, do you count your own mind as part of the world or not? 

99 bottles of beer...

take one down...

pass it around...

oops! I posted in the wrong thread! (~_^) 

She would go "ooh" either way because her reaction is based on how her brain works.

The question is whether she learns anything new by seeing color for the first time. If we think she does, then that means that her previous knowledge was incomplete.

And I should retract my wording in the previous post ... "Not all knowledge is knowledge of the world" is sloppy. It would be better stated as "Not all knowledge of the world is objective knowledge." 

A very atomized way of saying it:

Assumed she has perfect knowledge means either:

1)she knows exactly how red feels in her brain, so she doesn't go ooh. (This is impossible today.)

2) she doesn't know how red feels, so she goes ooh - but that means that she didn't know all, hence she doesn't have perfect knowledge, hence the initial condition isn't satisfied.


The problem with the excercise are the unrealistic and unclear assumptions.

It's the same thing as with direct brain interfaces - you can't activate certain brain areas by thinking about a certain point on the surface of the brain. Rather you have to think about something that has been measured to make activity at some spot on your brain, say, moving your left hand.

If you think that the brain should be self-aware in that you could control it like your hands, then there should be another, smaller "core brain" that should do this, but would that brain be aware of itself? Etc, we get into an endless string. As soon as you start "calculations" about what you should do to cause activation at some point in the brain, some other point activates when doing these calculations.
The brain can never think and perfectly see and control its actions at the same time. 

although i agree with you, i think it could be possible to have a connectionist system like the brain be both self-modifiable and self-aware 

that the brain of course has much more neurons and much much more connections than ever could be assembled according to genetic instructions - there just isn't enough place for information in the DNA.

It's that some details and some general structures are given in the genes, but a huge part of the formation of the brain in the fetus and during childhood is by self-organization.

If we take a long jump in thoughts, what self-organizing systems have humans managed to construct? Perhaps neural network learning and the related self-organizing maps (SOM):s, the latter which work by just eating data and automatically organizing it into groups (it takes a while though, but it requires NO teaching). Fascinating systems, but still very far from something as complex as what happens in the brain.
There are stuff like RAAM networks (recursive autoassociative memory) etc too... but as I understand, they're really crude too. 

then you ask, what if our brains are the "DNA" to some self-organizing system? 

the complex structure enables some even more complex activity. 

Do particle interactions care about the direction of time?
Everybody has probably heard about quantum entanglement and "spooky action at a distance", that would happen immediately, even if the entangled particles were separated far away, violating the speed of light limit.

There's a guy who now proposes to make an experiment that could have very unintuitive results:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1152

[Cramer�s] extra twist is to run the photons you choose how to measure through several kilometers of coiled-up fiber-optic cable, thereby delaying them by microseconds. This delay means that the other beam will arrive at its detector before you make your choice. However, since the rules of quantum mechanics are indifferent to the timing of measurements, the state of the other beam should correspond to how you choose to measure the delayed beam. The effect of your choice can be seen, in principle, before you have even made it.


There are those age-old questions like why does time flow forward? On many scales, time could be reversable. Basically, only entropy is the only thing that increases with time and shows the direction of "the arrow of time". Perhaps small single particles need not care about it? 

I must admit that I don't know much about the things above, so might use the wrong words / ideas. In a sense, I guess saying "immediately" is questionable in the einsteinian sense as everything is relative and local, meaning it's not clear what is meant if you say that two thing happen at the same time. 

You described teleportation principles... nothing else... 

...the discussion herein has been positively inspiring recently, and as soon as we get this bloody mission pack out I'll be back to ruminate and engage. Thanks metl and bam! 

I agree with JPL (I think)... this or very similar things have been done already.

I saw an interesting idea in New Scientistic a few years back: you can't use EPR-type stuff to communicate faster than light, because you have to compare the results at both sensors to observe the correlation that quantum mechanics predicts -- the output of each sensor is isolation is completely random. So maybe the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics is in some sense the universe's way of preserving causality. 

This EPR solution is only a way to teleport something, or somebody... In fact you are copying something using the effect of the "something" on an electron. Its paired electron is reacting in the same way, so you are able to define what was the matter who gave the effect detected, and then able to rebuild the original, atoms per atoms... It'a kind of high level copy...
The issue then comes after the copy, if the orginal is a human: what are you doing with the original ? Do you kill him ? It has some ethic consequences there !
So we are not simply talking about teleportation, but more about a high cloning technology... and its collateral effects.... ;P 

I don't know if the above explanations were clear... :( 

I read this last week.

These guys claim to have evolved simple artificial neural networks that exhibit "stage IV object permanence."

The results seem to challenge what we might think of as "necessary complexity" for intelligent-ish behavior to arise.

Watson, J. S. (2005). The elementary nature of purposive behavior: Evolving minimal neural structures that display intrinsic intentionality. Evolutionary Psychology, 3: 24-48.

http://www.google.com/search?q=www.epjournal.net%2Ffilestore%2Fep032448.pdf 

Was it this one ?

http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep032448.pdf 

but i wanted to provide a link to google's pdf-to-html function :)